During a time when everyone and everything is a publisher—including brands and celebrities—Chris Norris is working to give leaders of thoughts, industry and community a voice.
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I’ve always believed that people closest to the world’s toughest problems—like hunger, violence, racism, climate change, homelessness and poverty—should not only be empowered to implement and scale solutions with the support of municipalities and governments, but needs to communicate their issues, ideas, ideology and innovations in real-time in order to attract resources and inform others of their works, the latter particularly important as it will eliminate the duplication of innovations and maximize impact through collaboration.
As a journalist, the biggest problem I observe in Philadelphia—a big city with large pockets of problems and opportunity—is that active citizens are changing the world for the better, but they’re not always doing it together and more often than not their story of change goes unheard. These change agents aren’t selfish, at least not the majority of the ones I’ve met, so that’s not the reason they aren’t collaborating at their potential. So what’s inhibiting the connectivity of citizens through causes?
In my professional opinion, it’s the underdeveloped media and storytelling ecosystem that’s dedicated to highlighting the work of social innovators, particularly persons of color in cities with big, institutional problems. If an active citizen has an impact and either no one is around to document it or he/she lacks the capacity to capture, produce, safeguard and disseminate the experience themselves, how will society learn from it? How will people be informed of this new happening and be motivated to donate their resources to scale the cause?
Techbook Online, headquartered in the nation’s fourth largest media market, set out to solve this problem by publishing stories every day of impact, issue, inspiration and innovation. And while that routine has been a great public service, in a globalized, hyper-connected, issue infested society Techbook Online believes that serving the public is not enough, instead the public must first be assembled and given a voice. So in addition to my singular public service, in 2013 I founded the Board of Leaders and Doers (B.O.L.D), a growing, world-class roster of thought-leaders, subject matter experts and active citizens who produce content across disciplines and platforms.
The formation of B.O.L.D on one level provides Techbook Online with a steady stream of diversified contents to publish to its global information networks, but on a planetary level, new voices, ideas, opinions and perspectives are being unearthed and shared to the masses, and collaborations are being birthed by the second. The real-time impact of participative journalism can’t be denied and its global implications are beneficial and wide-ranging.
Now with more than 10 members of B.O.L.D worldwide and aiming to be at a 100 by March of 2015, I, as the CEO and founder of Techbook Online Corporation, can proudly say we live by our mantra: Together we can write an end to the world’s toughest problems!
Thanks for reading. Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® & I’m Drumming for JUSTICE!™
Great article. I enjoyed it very much. In a sense it’s about market making where you call the shots and decide what’s hot and what’s not, rather than waiting for others to do this. Good luck. I endorse the project.